ECB confident of Hundred as product, reluctant to let go of all teams at once

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) said that they are confident of their product –The Hundred after they received nearly 100 interested parties for buying stakes in the eight teams ahead of the October 18 deadline to register for the buying process.

With the Hundred's overseas broadcast rights currently valued at around £2 million per year and projected to grow 42 per cent year-on-year to jump to £33 million by 2030, the ECB is looking for buyers from all around the world to invest in their product. 

"We are not assuming that India's men's players will be released because that has not been what has happened," Richard Gould, the chairman of ECB, was quoted as saying by ESPNcricinfo.  

"We are confident in our product in terms of the window we occupy and the players we've got available. There are loads of T20 and short-format franchise competitions out there at the moment, and I don't think they are all going to last, in truth,” he added. 

However, Richard Thompson, the CEO of ECB suggested that by the start of the 2025 season of the Hundred, all eight teams might not be fully sold as franchises. He said that the ECB is not keen on selling a team as a franchise until and unless they get the true potential price of the product. 

"What we don't want is to just feel bounced into selling all of them and thinking, 'We could have got a lot more if we'd held back because that particular team wasn't ready to go,'" he said. 

"The worst thing we could do would be to undersell the game and look back thinking, 'We let some of these franchises go at prices that weren't full market value.’"

The Hundred, a 100-ball per team competition, almost three and a half overs shorter than the T20, one of the three international formats of the game, was started in 2021 and attracted record crowds for women's competition. 

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